in the United States in 1933, Simon made his first trip to North America the following year. On 11 December 1934, he founded in New York City a branch of what would become the International Wine & Food Society, and branches across the US, Australia and South Africa soon followed. His great friend Symons died of a brain haemorrhage on 26 August 1941, and Simon took over control of the Society from that point. He finally ceded control of the journal to Condé Nast Publications in 1962. The Spring 1963 edition was the first under its new editor, a former copywriter on Vogue called Hugh Johnson. André Simon died in 1970. He believed that "a man dies too young if he leaves any wine in his cellar"; there were only two magnums of claret left in his personal cellar at his death. On what would have been his 100th birthday in 1977, 400 guests gathered at the Savoy to drink to his memory with Château Latour 1945 that he had left for the occasion. Despite living in England most of his life, he remained a French citizen and was an Officier de la Légion d'Honneur as well as a CBE. Writing After The History of the Champagne Trade in England, Simon wrote perhaps his most distinctive book, The History of the Wine Trade in England from Roman Times to the End of the 17th Century, in three volumes (1906, 1907 and 1909). During World War I he wrote his biggest seller, Laurie's Elementary Russian Grammar, which was printed in huge numbers by the British War Office. After his split with Pommery he was able to devote himself to writing, with A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy selling 100,000 copies. He wrote 104 books during his 66-year writing career. He loved books; in 1919 he published the Bibliotheca vinaria, a 340-page catalogue of the books he had collected for the Wine Trade Club. As a Frenchman, his English prose was heavily influenced by the man who gave him his first break in writing – A. S. Gardiner of the Wine Trade Review. Simon once described a wine as "a girl of fifteen, who is already a great artist, coming on tip-toe and curtseying herself out with childish grace and laughing blue eyes." Hugh Johnson has called Simon's "figures of speech and choice of phrases deliciously oblique"; Michael Broadbent admires the "pure poetry"